The Eldo Gateway

What if you as a consumer could gain greater insight into how and when you use electricity?

The smart metering revolution is here, no longer are consumers left powerless to monthly bills that are inaccurate or estimated. A smart meter is to your old municipal meter what a typewriter is to your laptop. It is connected to your incoming supply and wirelessly sends the energy consumption data to a server. Eldo have developed a holistic and dynamic online software solution to interpret this data allowing you the consumer to better understand and manage your energy usage whether you are a household or business.

The Eldo Gateway is a user dashboard application and powerful data mining software running on secure servers. Eldo’s user friendly software enables the real-time tracking of your energy consumption, and then translates all that data into meaningful representations, informing your actions and empowering you to make optimal decisions daily and in the long term. Information is power, and the Eldo Gateway enables households and businesses to control and predict their costs, as well as measure the efficacy of any energy saving initiatives.

The Eldo Gateway is developed by Eldo‘s experienced team of both software and electrical engineers. Eldo’s industry experience with energy efficiency and management has led to their crafting of a user friendly solution designed specifically to meet the needs of the South African market. The more people in your company or home who are registered to the system, the larger the impact this will have on how you, your home and your business consumes energy.

Getting more people involved

Getting more people more intimately involved in the use of this system is not only fun, but helps drive energy efficiency initiatives to be even more effective from a behavioural change point of view. Information is power, and the Eldo Gateway delivers everything needed to empower you and your business to make better decisions and better manage increasing costs of your utility bills.

We all read about (or experienced) long queues outside the local municipalities’ electricity departments where consumers had been slapped with outrageously large electricity bills because of incorrect or estimated meter readings. Installing a smart meter linked up to the Eldo Gateway platform acts as a ‘check-meter’ of the utility, empowering the user to accurately query their utility bills. This interrogation of your utility bills and more value add services have been packaged by EldoAfrica into a solution called Smart Utility Management Services, or SUMS in short.

Our customers’ Smart Meters are linked over a GSM or an ADSL connection to Eldo’s Energy Management Dashboard as well as the SUMS Utility National Operations Centre, where our Energy Analysts will actively liaise with municipalities where overcharging has occurred to ensure you only pay for what you actually used, as well as make recommendations of how your home or business can save.

Screenshot of the Eldo Gateway energy consumption page, helping you to easily manage and understand you energy usage

Establishing a baseline

The establishment of a baseline is one of the crucial steps necessary to creating accountability around energy consumption, and counting, quantifying or measuring energy consumption is the first step towards managing it. You’re trying to measure a lack of energy use. As a result you need to understand your energy use beforehand, and this is why Eldo promotes the use of smart meters and comprehensive energy management software before trying to reduce your energy consumption. Without this step, you’re just fumbling in the dark and hoping that something you try works without really knowing what worked and how well,

So, if this solution is so straightforward and user friendly, does the functionality suffer?

EldoAfrica’s CEO, Morten Hald, states:

“Functionality is not compromised in any way for homes or businesses! You can check your cyclical consumption trends, your incoming power quality, and your daily performance relative to your saving targets. You can also view various reports such as electricity bill analysis, carbon emissions and savings reports. Each user is able to customise alert and notification settings in terms of frequency and sensitivity, which the Eldo Gateway then interprets and dispatches via SMS and email. Delivering a world class proactive and insightful energy management solution to South Africa!”